This application claims priority from Korean Patent Application No. 10-2004-0054078, filed on Jul. 12, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relate to generating an electronic document by continuously photographing a document in a moving picture, and more particularly, to generating an electronic document by continuously photographing a document having a plurality of pages in a moving picture.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to recent developments in moving picture compression technologies, portable device manufacturing technologies, and small size storage devices, portable devices that can photograph moving pictures such as digital camcorders or mobile phones having a built-in digital camera have been developed. Such devices can generate, edit, and store multimedia data whenever and wherever since the devices can be carried around with ease.
To convert a printed document, a book, etc. into an electronic document using such devices, conventionally, the document or the book is scanned using a scanner, a digital camera, etc. and the scanned image data is input to a document recognition system. Then, the input image data is recognized using numerous text recognizing algorithms, and the image data is converted into text data.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a conventional system that generates an electronic document. An image data inputting unit 110 receives image data of a document or a book that is to be converted into an electronic document via a camera, a scanner, etc. The input image data may, for example, be in a bitmap format. A text recognizing unit 120 recognizes the image data using numerous text recognizing algorithms, and converts the image data into text data. The created text data may be stored in a memory 130. A user interface unit 140 receives a command of a user and transmits the command to a controller 150, which controls the system that generates the electronic document. A display unit 160 displays information such as the result of the text recognition or the status of processing the command of the user. Although not illustrated in FIG. 1, other units such as an edit function performing unit for creating an electronic document in a desired form by editing the text data stored in the memory 130 may be included in the system.
FIG. 2 is a flowchart of a conventional method of generating an electronic document. A subject that is to be made into an electronic document (e.g., a paper document, a book, etc.) is photographed or scanned using an input device such as a camera or a scanner, and then the photographed or scanned image data is input to the system (S210). Commands such as an input start command may be input via a button, a mouse, etc. included in the user interface unit 140. For example, image data is created by pressing a recording button of a camera or a scan start button of a scanner. The created image data is stored in the memory 130 (S220). Then, text recognition is performed on the stored image data to convert the image data into text data (S230). The text data generated in such a way is stored in the memory 130. The text data generated by the text recognition is converted into an electronic document having a predetermined format set by a user. The electronic document is also stored in the memory 130.
However, if the document is composed of several pages as opposed to just one page, the above-mentioned process is repeated for each of the pages and generates one electronic file for each page. Then, all the electronic files are compiled together to form one electronic file. In this process, results such as an intermediate processing result of the photographed image or a final recognition result are displayed via the display unit 160.
Due to recent developments in image processing and text recognition technologies, there is a very high success rate of text recognition even in images with some deterioration. However, it is inconvenient to process a document with many pages using the conventional method, which generates an electronic document by performing text recognition using a camera or a scanner. That is, when there are many pages in a document that is to be made into an electronic document, image input and text recognition processes need to be repeatedly performed for each of the pages, and additional processes are needed. The additional processes may include separately storing the input image data and the text data created by text recognition, and then compiling the image data and the text data into one electronic document in an editing process. Therefore, much time and money are spent.